Little Saigon News Files for Bankruptcy Following Defamation Dispute

A war of words between two newspapers for the Vietnamese immigrant community has landed one paper in bankruptcy court.

The Little Saigon News, a Vietnamese-language newspaper distributed in 17 U.S. cities, filed for bankruptcy earlier this week after facing a $4.5 million penalty for declaring that a rival publication is owned by the Communist government.

That 2012 accusation against the Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper outside of Vietnam, had the potential to upset refugees who fled the war-torn country in the 1970s. It filed a lawsuit against Little Saigon, and jurors determined the statements to be false and defamatory after a four-week trial.

The Little Saigon News, which took in $3 million in revenue last year, is appealing the verdict but said it’s “financially impossible” to post a bond to stop collection efforts, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana, Calif. The newspaper was recently told to give up financial documents like bank account statements and vehicle ownership documents to the rival publication’s lawyers.

Bankruptcy halted that effort instead. In court documents, the Little Saigon News said it plans to reorganize and “continue operating as a successful publisher.” The weekly newspaper has 23 workers.

Both the Little Saigon News and the Nguoi Viet Daily News are based in Orange County, Calif., home to the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam with roughly 200,000 people. Some fought communism in the Vietnam War and fled after their opponents captured Saigon, the capital of former South Vietnam, in April 1975. Calling someone a Communist is more than a discrediting insult; it can trigger threats.

“Those lingering feelings of antipathy and hatred because of the suffering that occurred during the war, the imprisonment after the war, the economic collapse that occurred in Vietnam in the 1970s that forced tens of thousands of Vietnamese to flee by boat—those still remain within the refugee community throughout the United States,” said Jeffrey Brody, a journalism professor at California State University, Fullerton who has studied the issue.

Such accusations once had violent consequences, the Orange County Register pointed out.

“From 1981 to 1990, five Vietnamese journalists were assassinated in the U.S. for alleged affronts to the anti-Communist cause, including Tap Van Pham, the editor of Mai, a Garden Grove entertainment magazine who died when his office was torched in 1987.
A group called the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation took credit for the arson and for several other slayings.”

There have been more recent protests, like one in 1999 over a video store that hung a Socialist Republic of Vietnam flag and a poster of Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. The mere threat of protest in 2008 prompted a local community college to remove a Vietnamese flag that had been hanging for a decade.

The defamed Nguoi Viet Daily News has also been a target of anti-Communist critics.

In 2008, the Nguoi Viet News published a picture of a foot-soaking pedicure machine that was painted the shades of yellow and red used for the former South Vietnam’s flag. People who found the image to be disrespectful protested for months, shredding newspapers, peeing on cars and harassing the publisher, according to a lawsuit the newspaper filed over the incident.

When it comes to the dispute with the Little Saigon News, the defamation lawsuit came during a turf battle between the newspapers. Both had launched new publications that made them compete more directly for readers, according to the Orange County Register.

Write to Katy Stech at [email protected]. Follower her on Twitter at @KatyStech